Uncle Rod's Astro Blog

A quiet little spot where Rod Mollise shares his adventures and misadventures...

Sunday, October 28, 2012

Amateur Astronomy and Amateur Radio Redux

Well,
muchachos, it’s been a while since I said anything about the current state of
our avocation, so why don’t we do a little talking about the health of amateur
astronomy as another year winds down? In the past, I’ve used the condition of
our “sister” hobby, amateur radio, as a reference, which I will do again, since
these two seemingly different pursuits actually have a lot in common. One thing
we do not have in common, alas, is numbers. To cut to the chase, Ham radio is
growing, and amateur astronomy is either shrinking or—at best—remaining static.

Unk, who’s
been a licensed ham since 1969 (currently as AC4WY, a.k.a., “Alpha Charlie Four
Whiskey Yell”) is what you would
call an “old timer” (OT), so if you don’t know what the ham stuff is all about,
I can fill you in. Oddly, to your old Uncle, anyway, a lot of people confuse
ham radio and Citizens Band radio. Actually, the two pursuits couldn’t be more
different other than the fact that hams, sometimes
talk into microphones like the CBers do. In the 70s, CB was huge (“CONVOY!”), but in the intervening 40 years CB as a
hobby has died, and it is once again mostly the provenance of long-haul
truckers. I reckon the Internet and cell phones did CB in.

Cell phones
or no, ham radio is still around, probably because it is and always has been
more than just yakking into a microphone. There is that, which we hams call
“rag chewing,” but there’s a lot more. If you want to know about that “lots
more,” go here, but amateur radio, for one
thing, allows a lot more room to stretch out. CB is one band of frequencies,
11-meters. Amateur radio’s allocations in the spectrum (a word hams use at
least as much as amateur astronomers) ranges from the medium waves of
160-meters up into UHF and beyond.

Ham radio
was born with radio in the early days of the last century. In those heady times after Marconi’s first trans-Atlantic transmissions, everybody interested in radio was an amateur. It wasn’t long, of
course, before radio also became “commercial” and “military,” but by that time
hams were organized and in for the long haul. Numerous folks are responsible
for that, but the person who probably did more than anybody else was the original Old
Man, Hiram Percy Maxim, W1AW.The Old Man died in 1936 when he fell ill as he was returning from a visit to Lick Observatory. Just another of the many intersections of our two magnificent obsessions.

Amateur radio
continued on its merry way for the next several decades, becoming an important
national resource, since it contributed trained operators to both the Wars, and
especially to the ranks of WWII. The fifties were boom years. People were
relatively affluent and there was plenty of war surplus radio gear and parts,
and a burgeoning commercial “rig” industry. The end of the decade and Sputnik brought—for
once—a greater appreciation of science by the public, and amateur radio was at heart
a “scientific hobby.” The nuclear scare of
the 50s and 60s helped, too, with everybody suspecting it might not be long
before we’d need the wide-ranging emergency communications of ham radio.

Then came a
one-two punch that stopped amateur radio in its tracks. First was Incentive
Licensing. This idea, cooked up by the F.C.C. and the national ham radio
organization, The American Radio Relay
League, was not a bad idea. It rewarded hams with more frequencies on which
they could transmit in return for upgrading to higher license classes. Each
step up the ladder from Novice to Technician to General to Advanced to Extra
Class licenses would require Joe Ham to answer tougher questions about
radio/electronic theory and (depending on the license class) to copy Morse code
at ever higher speeds.

Trouble was,
a lot of the rank and file hams didn’t want to take harder tests in order to be
allowed to continue to operate on the same frequencies they’d always been on. You
see, amateur radio wouldn’t be given more bandwidth; instead, those who did not
upgrade to the Extra Class license would be evicted
from some areas of the radio spectrum where they’d formerly been able to
operate. Yes, the ARRL led, but it
led in a direction many hams didn’t want to go. Most buckled down and upgraded
or contented themselves with the band-space they had, but a not insignificant
number did drop out of the hobby.

The second
punch was Morse code as a requirement for a ham “ticket.” Amateur radio hung
onto “CW” long after military and commercial interests had abandoned that
“obsolete” communications method (which does have some real strengths). As the
seventies came and went, young folks, especially, were ever more turned off by
the code. It just didn’t seem as relevant
as those shiny new TRS-80 and Apple II computers.
Another strike against the code was that not everybody can learn to copy code
at any but the slowest speeds. Most people can,
but not everybody. No matter how hard they tried, more than a few people could
not learn to decipher Morse at the 20 words per minute the Extra required.

Thus began the
long and slow but seemingly inexorable decline of ham radio. Frankly, for a
while I was convinced the Radio Art might die out with my generation. Oh, the
number of hams increased, but not the number of young hams, and as a percentage
of the population we were probably shrinking. But then two things turned it
around. First, was the F.C.C.’s insistence about five years ago that Morse code
requirements be dropped. What also helped was the increasing integration of
computer communications methods, which turned the jungvolk on, into ham radio. Amateur radio’s numbers are now over 700,000,
and I would not be surprised to see 1,000,000 hams on the air before my time on
the third stone from the Sun is done.

I suspect
most of y’all know a little about the history of amateur astronomy. In the
beginning, just like in the early days of radio, following that beautiful
Italian evening when Galileo first took a peep at Jupiter with his little OTA,
everybody doing astronomy was an amateur. There continued to be considerable overlap between "professional" and "amateur" through Herschel and
even to the day of Lord Rosse. Until the dawn of the Twentieth century, when
astronomy morphed into astrophysics and the sundering came, with amateurs and
professionals becoming two distinct and different classes.

As that was
happening, a few far-sighted individuals like Unk Albert (Ingalls) and Russell
Porter and Charles Federer picked up the torch and began amateur astronomy as
we know it in the first decades of the last century. They are the Old Men of
amateur astronomy.

We were not
much more than the very tiny and somewhat odd preoccupation of a few people
until the end of the 1950s, till 1957 to be exact, when the space age began and
Americans and people around the world began to turn to the skies in both fear
and fascination. Amateur astronomy exploded in a small way, and kept on keeping
on even through the post-Vietnam/post-Apollo blues of the seventies when space
and science were in ill-repute with the public. In fact, our growth took a
sudden and dramatic spurt a couple of years before the arrival of Comet Halley,
and it looked for a while like the sky was literally the limit.

Alas, ‘twas
not to be, through no fault of our own. The public’s letdown following the
Great Comet’s poor showing hurt. The commercial telescope industry, which had
suddenly blossomed after years of slow growth, crashed, and a lot of the new
faces at our clubs began to drift away as their new telescopes, which had shown
nothing but a dim fuzzy where a glorious comet was supposed to have been, hit
the closet. After Halley, amateur astronomy’s number declined rather
precipitously. Us long time amateurs didn’t let that bother us, too much. We’d
suspected a lot of the new converts might not be around for the long haul, even
if Halley had turned out better than we thought it would.

Post-Halley
was a time of rebuilding, and we soldiered on. The coming of CCDs, wide field
eyepieces, and go-to over the last two decades has helped attract some new
folks, even some young folks—but I don’t think anybody would say we are
growing. In other words, brothers and sisters, there is now a lot of gloom in
our ranks, especially among the OTs.

“The club is
dying. Nothing but gray heads like us. Those cotton-picking kids are more
interested in…” Sound familiar? The rest of that quote, though, is “In going to
the drive-in picture show and playing with their slot cars.” Folks have been
predicting the demise of our hobby since I was in short pants. Yet, we are
still here. In other words, “DO NOT PANIC.” We can turn this around, y’all.

What are our numbers? That’s a little
difficult to say, since we can’t just count issued licenses like the hams can.
What I will give you here is based on what I’ve learned by looking at the
astronomy (with a lower case “a”) magazine sales figures and talking to people
in the amateur astronomy industry (who for obvious reasons may be a little
pessimistic these days). OK, OK…bottom line?

I would
guess there are about 100,000 reasonably serious amateur astronomers in the
U.S. of A., amateurs who are active to the point that they will at least haul a
telescope out into the backyard for a look at the pea-picking Moon every once
in a while. I would further guess that we have maybe another 25,000 hangers-on,
armchair astronomers, folks with a serious interest in astronomy, but who don’t
own telescopes or belong to a club. If y’all think I am wrong, let me know, and
tell me what your figures are, but I reckon I am about right. I would further speculate
that that number has been relatively stable over at least the last decade. 100,000
is a pretty big number, but for the whole country? You can see why the
equipment merchants were not having an easy time ever before this consarned
depression we are in.

So, we are
static. How can we change that—if we want to change it? I for one want there to
be more amateur astronomers. Beyond the selfless wish I have to turn everybody
on to the wondrous Great Out There, more folks in our pursuit mean more gear
for sale at cheaper prices and More Better Gooder lighting ordinances.

What do we
do? How do we do it? Maybe looking at what the hams do and have done can help,
since they seem to be more successful than us right now. The first thing we need
to do is get new people into our clubs. If nothing else, being in a club helps
a new amateur stick with and progress in the avocation. The hams have a leg-up
here, since hams themselves have been administering licensing exams for over
25-years. These exams are usually given by clubs, and having to go to the radio
club meeting or a club event like a hamfest for the test naturally makes the
newbie aware of said club. Many new hams just naturally jine-up right then and
there.

In amateur
astronomy, you get a telescope, these days usually from an online dealer, you
set it up, and you start looking at stuff with the aid of a book or something
you found on the Internet. A new amateur astronomer may not even know there is a club in her town. Unless she has an
amateur mentor (an “Elmer” in ham radio parlance) or happens to see a club mentioned
in an issue of Sky and Telescope or in
the listings on the magazine’s website, it may be a long time before the local astronomy
club is discovered, much less investigated.

So we
(amateur astronomers) need to get the word out. How? A good place to start
probably is those club listings Sky and
Telescope and Astronomy have on
their websites. Most new amateurs will eventually pick up one of the magazines
and visit one of the websites. Make sure (CHECK)
that your club’s info is up to date and that the person designated as the
contact responds promptly and in a friendly manner to all requests for
information.

That’s just
a start, and is not necessarily the best way to grab new amateurs. If your club
doesn’t have a Facebook page, get one up right away. “But Unk, we’ve got a web
page and a Yahoogroup.” Forget those things. Both are as dead as dern
door-nails. The young folk want Facebook.
The last thing they want to do is hunt for you-all on that ugly Yahoogroups
search page.

It is easy
to set up a Facebook page, and I would guess there is a member in your club who
can get you going in a few minutes. A Facebook page is also much better for
current members than email, webpages, or Yahoogroups. Members can receive
monthly meeting and other reminders on their smart phones, y’all can store club
files and pictures on the page, and do a lot more. The Possum Swamp
Astronomical Society Yahoogroup is still on the air, but I suspect it will go the
way of the dodo purty soon.

The Internet
is a way you can get the word out on
your club, but does not necessarily the best way. The best ways, surprisingly,
are still the old ones. The local ways: the newspaper (if your town still has
one), the cable TV community announcements channel/scroll, radio (only FM these
days; AM is even deader than the Yahoogroups), and fliers posted at libraries,
schools, and shopping malls—anywhere anybody will let you put one up.

Also
important is what is on your fliers. Be careful what you say. Don’t: “Pixley Astronomical Society Sky
Watch, Come and look at the Moon, Kiddies!” Do: “The Pixley Astronomical
Society will have a public viewing session, which is open to people of all ages
interested in astronomy.” At the public star gaze, have a table set up, maybe just
a lowly card table, with a sign on it with the club’s name and, in big letters,
“MEMBERSHIP INFORMATION.” At least be watching for prospective members. You’ll
know.

OK, you convinced
Janey New Amateur to attend a club meeting. How do you ensure she comes to the
next one? T’ain’t easy. Whether a radio club or an astronomical society, the
first visit will be intimidating. Lots of (mostly) male (mostly) gray heads.
You have to make Janey and her friends welcome. How? Whether your club is big
or small, designate a person to meet and greet visitors. Even if your club is
tiny, you might prepare a new member packet, at least a sheet of paper giving
meeting dates (some clubs change dates and times for various seasons), dark
site location and schedule, etc., etc. Just don’t just leave new members to
their own devices. However you do it, ensure they are connected with the club
and remain connected.

Whether ham
radio or amateur astronomy, the first toe in the water is quickly followed by
what seems to be a plunge into the deep, cold end of the pool. All that jargon,
all that complicated theory, all that scary equipment. And we don’t always make
it easy for the novices. Ham radio didn’t by sticking to the code for way too
long, and we’ve been guilty of the same thing when it comes to go-to.

With
telescope prices what they are today, almost any youngun can get their hands on
a pretty good instrument. Then comes the problem. Where do you point that
telescope to see the good stuff? What lots of astronomy club old timers told Mr.
Newbie in the past was, “Get a pair of binoculars and a planisphere and start
learning the constellations. Then you can move up to Sky Atlas 2000 and learn to star hop, and in few months, or maybe a
year or so, you’ll start seeing them Messiers.” How many newbies stuck with that?
Some obviously did, but only a minority.

Then came computerized
go-to telescopes, reliable automatic pointing for amateur scopes, beginning in
the late 80s and culminating in good, cheap go-to rigs by the end of the 1990s.
Problem was, a lot of the old timers, like their ham OT counterparts were
aghast. Goto? Why should these younguns have it easy? They ort ta suffer before they begin seeing all
those deep sky objects. These goobers would come out against go-to stridently
at meetings. I’ve had more than one newbie ask me how to “turn off” the go-to
on their shiny new Meade or Celestron, since they obviously shouldn’t be using
it. Remember, novices will take to heart what we say. They put great store in
what we, their elders—at least in astronomy—say, even if it is (mostly) in
jest. Why are some old timers so dead set against go-to, anyhow?

Beyond
learning the sky supposedly making a novice into a more “worthwhile” amateur,
there is also the gatekeeper thing.
The need to learn the sky and star-hop kept the riff-raff out. The bad news is that this kind or attitude is one of
the major reasons we’ve stopped growing. The good news? I hear less and less
criticism of go-to scopes lately. What do I
tell newbies? “Learning the sky is a wonderful thing. But you want to be able
to do some fun observing while you are learning it.” Anyway, new amateurs will
almost inevitably gain a basic knowledge of the sky even if they don’t buckle
down every night with a dadgum planisphere and a pair of Wal-Mart binoculars.
When they get to wondering what else is in the area of M42, and start looking
at a chart (or a smart phone these days), learning the sky follows naturally.

You’ve got
the novices over the first hurdle. How do you keep ‘em for the long run? Ham
radio, not unlike amateur astronomy, can be a rather solitary pursuit. Yeah,
you are communicating with your fellow OPs, but you are usually by yourself in
the (radio) shack while you are doing it. There’s the monthly club meeting, but
that’s not really enough. Most amateur radio clubs schedule events that help
with “unit cohesion,” that instill a sense of camaraderie and community. Those
range from hamfests (sorta like a star party), to antenna/tower raising bees
(sorta like helping your buddy put up that Pod dome), and Field Day (like a run
at the dark site).

One thing
that helped the PSAS survive the days when the membership roll was in a
downward spiral was attending star parties as a group. We would convoy up to
the Mid South Star Gaze or the Deep South Regional Star Gaze, have a ball, and would hardly be able to wait to go to the
next meeting to relive the fun and to lord it over the non-attendees,
describing in detail all the fun they’d missed.

We’ve just
finished a group project, creating a Human Sundial on the grounds of the public
school facility where we hold our meetings as a memorial to a deceased member. In the past we’ve built a club
observatory, set up booths at the fair and at the shopping mall, and,
naturally, done plenty of public outreach. All these things can help, not just
in attracting new members, which is what we usually focus on when planning a
set up for Astronomy Day or some such, but keeping old members active. Doing things as a group is fun.

Ham radio
only does Field Day once a year; we can have our field days, our group
observing runs, every dark of the Moon. Which is very important to keep old and
gain new members. The biggest membership crisis our club suffered was during
the years when we did not have a club observing site. One of the first things a
new member/new amateur will ask is, “Well, when do y’all get out with the
scopes?” Blank looks and the response “We don’t have a place to observe from at
the moment,” just don’t get it. Not just with new members. Old timers may begin
to wonder why they belong to a club that doesn’t do much astronomy. If you
don’t have a dark site, or at least some place where you can observe together, get one. If you don’t, your club will not remain
in good health for long.

One place
where neither hams nor amateurs are doing very well is with women and
minorities. Oh, there are more female and minority hams and amateur astronomers
than there used to be, but we still have a long
way to go. I think we are actually doing a little better in this regard than
the hams, but we are still not doing well enough. We need to get the word out
to (for us) non-traditional groups that amateur astronomy is fun for everybody.
These folks form a huge and mostly untapped reservoir of new amateur
astronomers.

What else
could help us bounce back like the hams have done? Sometimes I think we need a
stronger national group. The ham national organization, the aforementionedAmerican Radio Relay League, is and always has
been more involved in the day to day activities of amateur radio than our own
outfit, The Astronomical League. How can The
League, the AL, change to make it a more unifying force in amateur astronomy? I
have some ideas on that subject I’ll share with you some Sunday, but for now I
will just say the League needs to do more to make themselves visible to and indispensible
for Joe and Jane Amateur. The observing clubs are good, but there needs to be more.

So, can we
attain the numbers the hams now have? Amateur astronomy is a special pursuit,
one best suited to a very thoughtful and curious sort of person. It’s also, as
we all know, sometimes a lot of work.
“Many are called, few are chosen.” You can’t expect to keep every bright eyed
newbie who shows up at the dern club meeting. Still, I think amateur astronomy
is at least as interesting and engaging as amateur radio. We amateur
astronomers just need to get the word out, muchachos. And be more friendly to
the newbies, especially the kids who will replace us in our great obsession.

Sunday, October 21, 2012

Unk’s Yearly M13

Weekend before last’s dark of the Moon observing run? Let’s just say Murphyran rampant, muchachos. Your poor old Uncle’s rather modest plans came to naught. Not that there weren’t any amateur astronomy related goings on at all. Miss Dorothy and I traveled to Pensacola, Florida to spend some time with our old friends Doc Clay Sherrod and wife Patsy and to hear Doc’s yearly talk for the erstwhile Escambia Amateur Astronomers’ Association (EAAA). Clay’s talk on the Mayan calendar and the 2012 business was excellent, but that was the only successful amateur astronomy we did that weekend, which was a problem...

With the year two-thousand and twelve beginning to wind down it was past time for one of your old Uncle Rod’s annual traditions. No, I ain’t talking about my Christmas Eve peek at the Orion Nebula. What I am referring to is another tradition and resolution: that if I don’t do anything else astrophotography-wise over the course of a year, I will at least take a picture of M13, Hercules’ Great Globular star cluster.

It ain’t like I am exactly overwhelmed by the number of opportunities to do honest-to-god imaging down here in The Swamp. Couple my natural laziness with my wide array of astronomical interests and the usually poor Possum Swamp weather—it has been particularly bad this year—and months and months sometimes goes by without me opening a shutter. But I still want to keep my hand in, and thus was my yearly M13 born. I figgered that resolution would ensure I got out with the gear at least once between late spring and mid fall.

Film SLRs

I’ve talked about my three tries at film astrophotography once in a while, and suffice to say I didn’t begin to get the images I wanted till my last go, which began in the early 1990s. That culminated with what I considered my dream rig: a Ricoh KR5 Super 2 single lens reflex, an Ultima C8 SCT, and Fuji’s Super G800 color film. I got some shots of ol’ Globby that pleased me, but, let’s face it, most of my efforts were more like the one here: underexposed and slightly out of focus. Hey, let’s see you younguns try to get sharp stars while kneeling on a wet field peering at the dim focus screen of a film camera.

Aside from the mis-focus, there is a little star trailing, too, even though I did my best to guide (manually). I didn’t drift align; as usual I was in a hurry to get something before the weather shut me down. I just used the polar alignment reticle on the U8’s finder scope, and while that was OK, there was detectable field rotation over the course of the lengthy (by today’s reckoning) exposure M13 required.

Starlight Xpress MX516

Shortly after this new century began, I decided it was time for me to join the CCD revolution like some of my Bubbas. I was attracted to Starlight Xpress’ MX516 for two reasons: it was slightly cheaper than the equivalent camera from SBIG and it featured self-guiding. Using an interlaced chip, the camera devoted one field to guiding and one to taking the picture, alternating between the two tasks. That meant I could guide through the imaging scope and not worry about a guide scope or off-axis guider.

It was not a bad little camera, really, but I didn’t have much luck with it; in fact this ugly M13 taken one late summer night was one of my better efforts. I was happy, frankly, to get anything. The tiny chip delivered small pictures, and, worse, made it hard to find targets with my non-go-to Ultima C8. It was a fracking pain to get even bright M13 in the frame. I thought I’d use a flip mirror in concert with the Meade f/3.3 reducer to make things easier, but that didn’t work. Neither camera nor eyepiece would come to focus with the flip mirror assembly in the imaging train.

If I’d a-had good sense I would have bought Celestron’s new NexStar 8 or at least a set of digital setting circles before a CCD camera. I haven’t made too many Bad Mistakes in amateur astronomy over the years, but that dern shore was one.

SAC 7B

I sold the MX516 on the pea-picking Astromart after a couple of years of struggling. It was 2003 and I needed a camera, preferably a color camera, to capture the greatest Mars opposition of me or anybody else’s lifetime. I’d gotten some OK (monochrome, natch) shots of Jupiter with the MX516, but I well and truly ready to be done with it.

What I wound up with was the SAC 7b, a cooled color camera from a tiny outfit down in Florida. The story of the SAC cam and its maker is probably a worthy subject for a blog entry someday, but, to cut to the chase, the SAC 7b worked phenomenally well on Mars and Jupiter and the Moon and Saturn. On the deep sky? Not so much. It was nothing more than a long-exposure-modified and gussied up webcam. Still, despite a chip even smaller than the one on the MX516, I was able to get some recognizable deep sky images, including one of M13 one early fall night.

Meade DSI

I’d been studying Meade’s advertisements for their new CCD cameras for a couple of months. This “Deep Space Imager” looked interesting (assuming I wasn’t just reading more Meade hyperbole): easy to use, color, an at least somewhat larger chip than the ones on the SAC and the Starlight Xpress, no need to worry about cooling since it didn’t need to be cooled. Less than 300 George Washingtons was the entry fee, which got my attention, you betcha. I hesitated, but, dang it, that CCD revolution was passing Unk by. Yes, I’d done some good planetary work with the SAC 7B, but that wasn’t like doing deep sky shooting with a real CCD.

One thing that really helped me get the DSI going when it arrived was software that, as I have written before, while a little complicated, did everything in automated fashion. Instead of, for example, leaving it to your discretion to take dark frames, the DSI software, Envisage, reminded you to, prompting scatter-brained ol’ Unk to cover (and uncover) the scope’s aperture. What also helped a tremendous amount was my new CG5 mount.

The Celestron CG5—which I still have and use—was easy to polar align with a built-in routine in its hand control, and go-to meant I didn’t have to struggle with flip mirrors or other foolishness to get my targets in the small field of the DSI. If something didn’t wind up in the frame after a conventional go-to, I could engage Precise Go-to mode, which would put the target on the DSI’s chip every stinkin’ time—after a short stop to center a nearby bright star. The CG5’s gears were good enough for me to do unguided 30-second shots with the C8 at f/3.3. Yay! No guiding!

My initial results with the DSI were not pretty, even by my humble standards, but they were OK and much better than what I’d done with the MX516. One early June night in 2005 that for some weird reason turned out semi-clear, the shots began to roll out of the little camera: M57, M10, M12, M5, and, yes, M13. My focus was slightly off, my processing was wrong-headed, and I didn’t know how to get rid of the background color gradient caused by the light pollution at my club’s in-town observing site, but it was a first step. It heartened me, and on that night I decided to remain in the ranks of the CCD army, even if I was in the rear guard.

ST2000

After a year or two of getting my feet wet with the DSI and coming to believe there was something to this CCD business after all, I was lucky enough to move up to a big boy’s camera, the (black and white) SBIG ST2000. In one fell swoop I went from the teeny-weeny DSI sensor to a 1600x1200 Kodak chip. Not only was there cooling, there was regulated cooling, which some of today’s cameras don’t even feature—set the camera for a chosen temperature and it would keep the camera at that temperature. Oh, and there was a second, smaller CCD chip onboard for SBIG’s proprietary self-guiding system.

Hoo-boy. That was a lot of new stuff for CCD fumbler me to grok. The larger CCD chip helped both in framing bigger objects and finding smaller ones. I didn’t have to use Precise Go-to anymore. But I had a lot to learn. Starting with the fact that if you used an f/3.3 reducer on your SCT with the 2000 as I sometimes did, you would see one hell of gradient from light pollution and vignetting. It was easy to banish that with a flat-field frame, but I had to learn how to take those. The self-guiding system seemed like a dream come true—no guidescope or off-axis guider from Hell required—but it was dang sure not as easy to get working as I had hoped.

That was not so much because of the camera, but because of its software. I had both the software that shipped with the ST2000, CCDOps, and the step-up program from Software Bisque, CCDsoft. CCDSoft gave me fits, especially with its guiding calibration routine. Basically, there were two choices: recalibrate the guider before every exposure, or enter your declination in the guide window, which would supposedly allow you to skip further calibrations. Unfortunately, entering declination of the current scope position didn’t seem to help. My guiding was putrid unless I did a new cal. If I were able to successfully complete a calibration. It failed more often than not, and it wasn’t always clear why.

I finally settled on calibrating before each shot, not that big a deal, and, gave up on CCDSoft and just used CCDOps, which seemed easier to use if not nearly as full-featured. It was more prone to completing guider calibration successfully, too. One thing both these programs did? Give me a better appreciation of how good PHD Guiding is.

The above might lead you to think I had nothing but bad luck with the ST2000. Quite the opposite; I had very good luck with it. As soon as I had an idea of how to proceed, the 2000 began cranking out images like this annual M13. Yes, the core is blown out and it’s a little too contrasty, but the stars are round and small. I still like it. AND the camera managed this with my humble CG5 German mount, which it had no trouble guiding as long as I kept the balance right.

So why haven’t I used the cotton-picking 2000 in a couple of years (at least)? First, as always, I want color. Yes, I could get color with the ST2000 via multiple exposures through filters, but trying to do that in the (not bad but not insignificant) light pollution of my dark site would likely be a challenge for image processing challenged me. Also, my opinion is that a real CCD camera is probably best for folks who have observatories, or who at least can roll the scope out. Doing flats, for example, is an absolute pain when you have to re-do them every single time because you have to take the camera off the scope and pack everything up.

Still, I may get back to the SBIG before long. It would be nice to use a cooled camera when winter goes and spring comes. My DSLR does fairly well on warm nights, but I’d be a-lying if I said I wasn’t troubled by noise on hot nights down in the ol’ Swamp. I do plan to make some changes to make the 2000 more pleasant to use: I’m going to forget the self guiding and just go with PHD and my StarShoot autoguider. Since I won’t be self-guiding, I’ll be able to use the wonderful Nebulosity 3 to run the camera. And if I stick to the f/6.3 reducer, I’m thinking Gradient Xterminator might allow me to forego flats.

Canon Rebel Xti (400D)

Ah, yes, the DSLR. I got my Canon Xti mainly to take the terrestrial pictures for my last book, Choosing and Using a New CAT, but it’s been wonderful on the sky, too. No, it ain’t as sensitive as the dadgum ST2000, but it is more than sensitive enough for my needs. I hadn’t been able to get out with it much over the last year due to the aforementioned punk weather, but I was determined to change that the weekend before last and bring back 2012’s M13 in the bargain. I wanted to better last year’s effort shown here, which was plagued by haze and a too low Great Glob when I finally went after it as November came in.

I loaded up a passel of gear: Atlas, C8, computer, guidescope, etc., etc., and headed for the Possum Swamp Astronomical Society’s storied dark site. Got set up. Guzzled a Monster Energy Drink. Took a few snapshots of the field and my new PC setup with my little Fuji Super-zoom camera. This time out, I placed the PC and its ancillary equipment in the back of the 4Runner, Miss Lucille Van Pelt, rather than using the camp table and computer shelter. Less stuff to worry about, and I hoped the PC and everything else might stay a little drier when heavy dew began to fall. Worked great.

But that was the only thing that worked great. Fired up the Atlas and EQMOD on the laptop. Got out the game pad I use as my “hand control.” Tried to slew the scope to put it in position for a borescope polar alignment. No workie. A look at EQMOD’s joystick setup screen told the story: The Toshiba laptop is fairly new and I’d never got around to setting up the gamepad and assigning the many EQMOD functions to its buttons. Wasn’t about to try to do that on a dark field. Drug out the SynScan HC.

The alignment went OK, with M13 being in the field when I went there. Hokay, get PHD Guiding and the guidecam, my cool little StarShoot autoguider, focused. Hmm. The stars in M13’s field seemed dimmer than I remembered from last time. Whatev. Mount the Rebel and focus up. What the—? l Not only was there no M13 visible, none of the relatively bright stars in the field showed up either, even when I upped the exposure and slewed around a little bit. Puzzled, I looked up to see clouds. Lots of them. I gave it another hour, but at 9:30 in the fracking evening I packed up and headed back to the Old Manse since it had become evident I wouldn’t be even get any visual observing done.

Mallincam Xtreme

Deep sky video has always been a parallel interest of mine when it comes to imaging. You can get a lot of fiercely dim stuff with a deep sky camera, but the pictures I got with my old Stellacam II black and white rig hardly compared to the big beautiful color shots that came out of the Rebel. That changed a little with the coming of the color Mallincam Xtreme to Chaos Manor South. No, the pictures it produces, the still pictures you can grab from the video stream, still don’t measure up to the Canon’s output, but even single frame grabs look purty dern good. And it dang sure is easier to get those shots than it is with either a CCD or DSLR.

One thing was clear, if I was to get this year’s M13, I would have to get a move on. My last decent no-Moon opportunity to try for it in 2012 would be on Saturday 13 October; by the next dark of the Moon it would really be low. The weather, as is par for the course down here in October, continued to be unsettled, and I wasn’t about to drag a ton of stuff out just to be skunk bitten again. I also thought that even if I had to shoot through haze the Xtreme might still bring home the bacon.

I headed for our Tanner-Williams, Alabama observing field a little later than I should have Saturday afternoon, but I wasn’t worried. Yeah, it takes a fair amount of gear to run the Xtreme—computer, monitor, DVR, cables—but still considerably less than what’s needed to go DSLRing. What did worry me was the bands of clouds in the west.

Didn’t take that long to get Celeste, my C8, on her CG5, the Mallincam connected, and the computer and video display set up in the back of the 4Runner as I had the Saturday before. Turned out all my worries were groundless. Despite arriving at the site later than I usually do, after set-up I still had to cool my heels for a while before the bright stars winked on. And the clouds that had concerned me looked to be scudding off to the east.

Soon as there was a goodly selection of alignment stars, I fired up the CG5. I was using the hardware hand paddle this time out instead of running the mount with NexRemote. I love NR, but using the NexStar hand control cuts down on the gear burden and is a little quicker to get going. Powered up the Xtreme, told it (via the Mallincam software running on my Asus netbook) to draw crosshairs on the screen, and got started. Did a 2-star alignment followed by 4-calibration stars, ran the (old fashioned point-at-Polaris) polar alignment routine in the hand control, and re-did my 2+4.

The last two cal stars landed in the field of the Xtreme, so I thought my alignment would be good enough, despite my realization that I’d forgot the Up and Right Rule. For best results with the CG5, always center the alignment stars using the up and right keys on the HC only (use the other keys to position the star so you can center the stars with up and right). The CG5 has plenty of declination backlash, and up-and-right-only helps the mount deal with that. My R.A. balance was off, too, judging from the sounds the CG5 was making, never a good thing for go-to accuracy.

Mashed the keys to send Celeste to M13, and held my breath for a minute. The CG5 has been uber-reliable over the seven years I’ve had it, but I am used to computers pulling their little practical jokes on poor old Unk in the middle of the night on a dark observing field. Not this time. When the motors stopped their weasels-with-tuberculosis sounds, M13 was in the frame. Not centered, but in there.

Wheeew! Focused up with my JMI Motofocus—which I would not live without for imaging of any kind—set the exposure to 14 seconds (7 would actually have been enough), and pushed the button to start my Orion StarShoot digital video recorder rolling. That little thing is one of the best buys I have made in quite a while. It is considerably smaller than a pack of cigarettes and will go all night on an 8gb SD card and its internal battery.

Talk about easy to use, too: pushing and locking the StarShoot DVR’s one-button wired remote will turn it on and start it recording. Release/unlock the button and it will stop and turn itself off. I still focus and frame using my ancient portable DVD player (I use a cast-off cable TV switch box to send video to either the recorder or the DVD player as necessary), since the display on the StarShoot is a little small for my old eyes. Back home, I can either output NTSC video to a DVD recorder to preserve my “masterpieces,” or connect the recorder to a computer and drag the night’s video files to my hard drive. Simple and sweet and the video looks very good, even on our big-screen LG TV.

So how’d I do? See for yourself (above). No, the Xtreme cannot compete with a DSLR for prettiness. But its results are at least as good as my early attempts with the Meade DSI, and it sure is easier to use than either. No guiding. No dark frames. Just turn on the camera, slew to your target, adjust exposure and other settings to suit you, and do a little recording. When doing The Herschel Project, I found I could easily record 100 objects over the course of a short PSAS observing run, and upwards of 200 on a long night at the dadgum Chiefland Astronomy Village. I was happy and satisfied when this year’s M13 flashed onto the big screen at home.

When M13 was in the can, I found to my surprise that the skies were still acceptable. The last of the clouds had scudded off, and while it was very damp it was not unpleasant. What to do? First I took a couple of videos for The Herschel Project Phase II as part of my quest to get better looking color pictures of some of the more spectacular H-objects. After that, I just toured the best of the best of the fall sky. The standout was probably The Sculptor Galaxy (a.k.a. The Silver Dollar Galaxy, a.k.a. The Golden Galleon Galaxy), NGC 253, which stretched all the way across my monitor and showed a lot of detail despite being way down in the Possum Swamp light dome.

Another target Saturday night was the current comet de jour, Hergenrother (168/P). It’s caused quite a sensation in our ranks in a small way. Probably because we’ve been experiencing something of a comet drought over the last year. It looked good in the Mallincam, sporting a pretty—if small—tail. I did think it was a little disappointing in a buddy’s 15-inch Dobbie. Considerably dimmer than I expected, maybe magnitude 11 rather than the 10 I’d been hearing about on the Internet amateur astronomy boards.

Hergenrother’s dimness may have had more to do with the heavy haze that was coming and going than this cute little comet’s intrinsic brightness, but if you haven’t seen it, better get out and take a look now. The Moon is on her way back and the comet only looks as good as she does now because of an outburst—weather made me miss Hergenrother’s outburst peak of near 9. I suspect the comet has begun to fade already and will soon be on her way back to magnitude 15 or dimmer where she would normally be.

After the comet was recorded, I took a second "insurance" M13 sequence, and did some more hopping around. What finally shut me and my pals down was not the return of the clouds, but the extremely heavy dew. I’ve seen it worse in late October, but not much worse. By the end of the evening Celeste’s OTA was raining. I finally pulled the big switch about 11, and when my mates saw what I was doing they decided that looked like a good idea and threw in the cotton-picking towel, too. Soon enough I was back within the comforting walls of Chaos Manor South reviewing the night’s videos on the TV in the den while sipping, err, “sarsaparilla.”

And that was that for another year, muchachos. 2013’s M13? Oh, I would be lying if I didn’t say I have big plans for it, as usual. Maybe a tricolor exposure through the SBIG ST2000. Ground truth, though? Given my weather and my skills, all I can promise is that I will come back with something. Sometimes, like this year, that is just good enough.

Sunday, October 14, 2012

The Star Party Zoo

This was
supposed to be an article on imaging, muchachos, but pore old Unk was well and
truly skunked last Saturday, which had looked close to perfect all day. Just after
I had, natch, lugged a ton of gear out to the Possum Swamp Astronomical
Society dark site, the sky closed down with an audible thud. No DSLRing for moi. So, since the fall star party season is now in full swing, I thought I'd say
a few words about that instead.

Star party zoo?
The whosit of the whatsit? Believe it or not, it is fall star party season
again. That means it’s not just time for observing under blessedly cool(er)
hurricane-free skies, it is time for my semiannual rant about how we should
conduct ourselves at star parties. I know you get tired of hearing this every
cotton-picking fall and spring, but I still see way too much questionable
behavior, and me and you and Sister Sue can do better.

I am an
animal lover. Not just cats and dogs; I even love Bambi—shame he and his kin have
to be so dadgum tasty. But there are a few species I would like to see go extinct. I expect you will recognize some of
these critters, and I also expect you, embarrassedly, like Unk, will have to
admit you’ve sometimes shared some of their traits:

Fieldus Territorialis

These aggressive beasts are highly
territorial. Their natural habitat is the observing field, where they can be
spotted during the early hours of an event. Please approach with caution, as
they will vigorously defend their range with, at least, blood-curdling howls…

I am happy our
major national star parties and even our smaller regional ones are so popular. The
growth of light pollution and the more social character of today’s amateur
astronomy have seen to that. But that causes problems for events that have
experienced explosive growth over the years—The Texas Star Party and the Winter Star Party come to mind. Observing fields
that used to be spacious are now cramped, and you can’t expect more than just
enough room for you, your scope, your observing table and maybe a tailgating canopy.

Alas, some
folks just don’t understand that. Why shouldn’t THEY get two spaces? THEY like
plenty of room, and it is all about THEIR needs, after all. Fuhgeddaboutit. If
space is at a premium, you grin and bear it. When somebody pulls in beside you,
smile; don’t act like they’ve got
the cooties.

Observicus Noticus

These curious creatures, which
sometimes travel in herds, are usually inoffensive but sometimes annoy their
fellow beasts. They don’t seem to build nests, remaining constantly on the move…

I really
have to wonder why some folks go to star parties. I’m talking about the people
who set up a scope but never uncover it, or at least never use it. The telescope
may be a nice one, but the owner never does a thing with it. They don’t even
seem much interested in looking through other
peoples’ telescopes. They wander the field all night long without seeming
purpose. The Noticuses wouldn’t
bother me if not for the fact that in their aimless shambling they tend to do
things like bump into tent ropes and poles and trip over cables. More than
once, I’ve lost my mount’s go-to alignment when a Noticus has snagged my NexRemote cable in his unending progress
from Here to There.

Watchalookinatamistus

The Watchalookinatamistus is not
dangerous. It is just a pest, if sometimes a big pest; especially for the
larger animals of the field. This scavenger’s constant search for the leavings
of fellow creatures has occasionally driven field inhabitants to near madness…

Like the
closely related Observicus Noticus, Watchas never use their own telescopes. If they have brought one with them
it stands unused and unloved collecting dew all night long. Unlike Noticus,
Watcha doesn’t just shamble up and down the field, though, the Watcha cadges
looks constantly. In fact, its name
comes from its distinctive call, “Watcha lookin’ at mister? Can I see? Huh, can
I?”

Most of us
are happy to let all and sundry observe through our scopes occasionally, but
people with serious observing programs, especially those with the large telescopes,
which draw these field denizens like flies to—err…honey, get tired of not just being asked for a peek, but their
guests’ near insistence that they
turn the scope to M13 or M42 one more
time.

Raffleus Mopicus

Mopicus’ survival mechanism is its
extreme suspicion of other animals at feeding time. This scavenger finds it
impossible to cooperate with its fellow creatures, even those of its own
species, when choice prey is at stake…

Everybody
loves star party raffles. The exciting prospect of winning an Ethos or an ES
100, or even just a book or DVD is a powerful inducement to buy tickets. Alas,
even when there are lots of prizes, not everybody can win. Unk, who rarely wins
a dagnabbed thing, has learned to accept that with good grace. Some folks
cannot, and in their disappointment forget how to be good sports. You are allowed to be disappointed when that beautiful
13mm Ethos goes to Cousin Ezra and not you, but keep your whining and muttering
about RIGGED RAFFLES to yourself. We really don’t want to hear your conspiracy
theories about why the Pixley A.S. members always
win everything.

Foodus Horribilus

Foodus is something of a
contradiction. While it is an enthusiastic omnivore, feeding on just about
anything, it never seems able to find the sustenance it really wants…

When you
sign up for a star party meal plan, don’t count on five star dining. If you do you
will be badly disappointed. That said, most star party fare is at least edible.
I can count on one hand the times I’ve had meals at star gazes that were or
were close to indigestible. Good old Foodus,
though, never stops complaining
about the victuals (and also never, ever volunteers to help prepare meals).

Funniest
thing? Foodus complains a lot, but
only between large mouthfuls; a meal’s supposed poor quality never affects his
appetite. He usually fails to sign up for the bad old meal plan in advance, but
is right put out if he can’t be accommodated at the last minute when he decides
supper looks OK after all.

Whiteliticus Rex

Whiteliticus is less common than it
used to be on most observing fields, thanks in part to the downright aggression
most other species display to these dim-witted beasts. One’s mere presence evokes
the deafening call “DOWSE THAT LIGHT!” from other fauna…

You would
think amateurs who attend major star parties would know not to blind everybody
around them with a white flashlight or a too bright red one, but a few folks
never seem to get the message. Even when they’ve been embarrassed a time or
two. The way to make this one go extinct? I don’t know, but hollering won’t do
it. Having one of the star party staff give ‘em a good talking to, which, if
appropriate, includes the phrase “Or you will be shown the gate” is the best
defense against these brutes.

One promising
development? Use of (too) bright red headlights,
the LED lights that go on your head with an elastic band, seems to have fallen
off. These things are not a bad idea, but their red LEDs are almost always too
bright, and most wearers are not careful to keep them pointed down, even though
that is easy to do.

Earliupicus

Most star party species are
nocturnal. The Earliupicus, conversely, is out foraging at the break of dawn
and returns to its nest shortly after sundown…

I used to be
surprised to be awakened at 6 a.m. at a star party, but eventually came to
expect it. At oh-dark-thirty a few worthies start rustling around in the
bathroom, gargling their little throats out and SINGING, and trotting around
the field chatting happily and at full volume with fellow Earliupici. You can
shush these folks, but they will never change, and by the time you’ve finished
giving them a good piece of your mind, you are fully awake, anyhow. Best bet?
Ear plugs.

Why do some
people get up so early at a star party? Because some folks go to bed early,
even at star parties, I reckon. Yeah, I know it’s difficult to switch over from
the 9-5 routine for just a few days, and it’s rare for Unk to make it past 2 or
3 a.m. for that reason. That doesn’t explain why it is not unusual to see some
Bubbas hitting the hay at 2100, though. When I ask ‘em “why,” the response is
invariably “Big day tomorrow, best turn in.” OK…well bless their pea-picking little hearts, I reckon.

We all enjoy
star parties in own way, and if you are an Earliupicus, that is cool; all I ask
is that you keep it quiet in the a.m.—no more marching to the showers singing
"Hippity-Hop to the Barber Shop" in off-key fashion. Oh, and don’t get all
huffy about observers returning to the cabin in the wee hours and disturbing
your beauty rest.

Walkonasaurus

These lumbering, solitary beasts have
no home range. They are strictly nomadic, appearing on the field’s savanna without
warning…

In
principle, “walk-ons,” folks who don’t register in advance for a star party,
are not a bad thing. Nothing wrong with a little extra moola in the event’s
coffers is there? But when you think about it, they are another species that
needs to go extinct. What’s so bad about somebody appearing at the star party after
it’s got underway and asking to register? Planning, for one thing. If the organizers
don’t know how many folks will attend, they cannot guarantee there will be
space on the field and in the cabins for everybody. If there’s to be a meal
plan, it will be impossible to know how much food will be required.

If everybody
were to decide to play this game, not registering in advance for the Possum
Holler SP and only showing up for it if and when they are sure the weather will be nice, there wouldn’t be many star parties. The organizers would not have the money to
put on the event even if they were able to estimate the resources they’d need.

The worst thing
about walk-ons? Many of ‘em do not arrive in the morning. Or in the afternoon.
They wait till dark and try to drive onto the field in a vehicle with
headlights blazing, causing major disruption. That alone is enough to encourage this as a standard response: “I am very sorry. You can’t attend the star
party if you are not already registered. We look forward to seeing you next
year.” I’ve got a heart, and am willing to consider individual/special cases,
but, hey, y’all, in the absence of extenuating circumstances just register by the date you are told to
register by.

Musicus Dratticus

Who doesn’t enjoy the melodious calls
of our wildlife? Unfortunately, few of their fellow creatures can tolerate the
loud and grating song of Musicus. Despite the annoyed and even threatening responses
of other creatures, Musicus persists in his unending symphony of distraction...

I like
music. Sometimes I even like to listen to music while I am observing. Usually
when I’m doing casual star gazing rather than a serious project, and usually
when most of my fellow partiers have gone to bed. And when I listen to music, I listen with headphones. I wouldn’t
dream of imposing my musical tastes on the people around me on the field. Amazingly,
some amateurs don’t get that.

To put it
simply: if you don’t want to be made to listen to Uncle Rod’s music, Tammy
Wynette’s “This Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad” or The Allman Brothers’ Live at the Fillmore East, don’t make me
listen to your “Pachebel’s Canon” or Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Nuff said?

Messasaurus

Most species do not foul their own
nests. Messasaurus, who is anything but extinct, is an exception. Evolutionary
biologists speculate these animals save energy by forcing other field inhabitants
to clean their dens…

I’ve
addressed this more than once. Bottom line? Unk
ain’t your mama. In the cabins, clean up after yourself. On the field,
clean up after yourself. I don’t want to see or deal with the mess you leave in
the bathroom. The star party organizers sure don’t want to deal with the mess
you leave on the field after you’ve gone home. Savvy? I thought so.

Anythingbutastronomicus

The Anything is a creature that is
seemingly poorly adapted to the observing field. Nevertheless, they are common
there...

Why do
people go to star parties? I know there are many reasons other than or in
addition to observing: to spend time with their fellow amateur astronomers, to
look longingly at dealer tables, to attend presentations. Still, I wonder about
some folks. I mean the people you’ll find on the field and in the chow hall
talking anything but amateur astronomy
or astronomy in general. Ever. That's not the problem, though; the problem is their choice of topics. They aren’t always
obnoxious, but often are, since their gab-fests almost inevitably devolve
into elevated-volume “discussions” of Democrat versus Republican/Conservative
versus Liberal. Y’all can listen to Rush Limbaugh or watch Bill Maher at home, so why doncha?

Headlightonicus

This creature is notorious for its
tendency to sudden flight from the field at any moment. It may be grazing
peacefully one second, and take to its heels the next, sending its fellow field
residents into a panic...

I do not
mind people walking off the field early. Hell, I don’t even mind them driving off early. Hardcore as Unk used
to be and would still like to be, by 3 a.m. he most assuredly feels the strong
pull of the motel or cabin. What is hard to stand is Headlightonicus’ usual behavior: blinding the whole field with his vehicle’s
backup lights, interior lights, trunk lights, and headlights.

This is a
no-brainer, y’all: if you know you will want to leave before dawn—and most
times you will know—park your car well
off and facing away from the observing field. Turn off interior lights and
disable backup and running lights if possible, but if you are sufficiently far
from the field, that won’t be a problem. If it is possible to do so safely, you
might even navigate by parking lights until you are down the road apiece.

Burglaraticus

The most timid of all star party field
creatures, Burglaraticus will emit deafening alarm cries when it feels
threatened, which is “often.” This species is so constantly fearful its howls
of terror are frequent even when it is not in observable danger…

It happens
every star party: Goo-goo Mew-mew decides he needs something out of his
vehicle. He grabs the door handle, forgetting he’s turned on the car alarm. Or
he squats down at his scope activating the horn and lights with the key fob in
his pocket, or at least unlocking the jitney and flashing the lights and
beeping the horn. Nobody likes him.

Kats and
Kittens, it is easy to turn off the car alarm. Or, if you can’t do that, you
can leave the vehicle unlocked.
Scout’s honor, none of us is out to pilfer your beautiful Ford Fiesta. Put the keys somewhere where you won’t keep unintentionally
mashing the buttons—and where you won’t lose them, of course…

Yeah, every one
of these beasts should go extinct, and that could happen very easily. If each
and every one of us—including Unk, who is hardly
innocent of assorted star party foolishness—would simply remember the good ol' Golden Rule: TREAT OTHER PEOPLE LIKE
YOU’D LIKE TO BE TREATED.

If we all
did that, there’d be none of the unhappiness and friction that sometimes
happens at star parties. Which would be a good thing. Star parties are supposed
to be fun, and I don’t know about
you, but I have a hard time having fun if the people around me aren’t having a
good time, too. Now, get out there and party.
Just be sweet and all will be well,
muchachos.

Sunday, October 07, 2012

Uncle Rod and Uncle Al

Al Nagler, that
is. I met him at the Texas Star Party years ago and have talked with him on
the phone a time or three—but who hasn’t? Al is friendly and gregarious and
always willing to talk to any amateur astronomer. But this is really more about
me and his eyepieces and the changes they’ve wrought on our avocation. Or maybe
what it’s really about is the evolution of eyepieces over my near 50 years (ulp!)
as an amateur. Even in that case, Al and TeleVue are a huge part of the story.

When I got started in 1965, most of us didn’t give too much
thought to eyepieces. At least me and my fellow teen/pre-teen buddies in our
little club, The Backyard Astronomy Society, didn’t. Not at first. One or two
eyepieces came with your telescope. You used them to look at stuff. If you only
had one, you could use the Barlow that was usually in the box with the scope to
give you one more magnification.

The eyepieces you got with your wonder-scope? That depended
on the scope. Those of us who started out with Japanese import telescopes were at
the bottom of the power curve. Most Tasco/Sears/Jason telescopes came with
multiple eyepieces. Almost always two and sometimes three. That was the good.
The bad was that what you got, with a few exceptions, was very simple ocular
designs, usually of the Huygenian persuasion. That was how the sellers could
afford to include several “eye-lenses” as some of us called ‘em.

These oculars, sometimes also referred to as “Huygens
eyepieces” consisted of two simple lens elements. The books, or at least some books, say a Huygenian can be OK
with a longer focal length telescope. Maybe so if your focal ratio is in the
neighborhood of what Huygens himself used way back in 1654—say f/200 or so. Even with
a long Tasco refractor these poor things are bedeviled by short eye relief,
tiny apparent field of view (AFOV), and much chromatic aberration.

The designs of our eyepieces were not just punk, the
execution of those designs left a lot to be desired. The oculars that came with
most of our telescopes were what we came to refer to as “the little ones.” At
first, these eyepieces, “Japanese Standard” eyepieces with barrel diameters of
.965-inches, seemed OK, about like the eyepieces for the microscopes we used in
school or maybe found under the Christmas tree. That changed when some dog—Unk
in the case of the B.A.S.—moved on up to a Real Telescope, like an Edmund or
Criterion.

Once you got beyond the least expensive Space Conquerors and
Dynascopes, you got real eyepieces,
1.25-inch barrel diameter American Standard oculars, to go with your real
telescope. The designs were still simple, mostly two element Ramsdens and three
element Kellners, but they were at least somewhat better than the Huygenians,
and the larger diameter barrels allowed slightly more field. In general terms,
the 1.25-inch eyepieces were and still are of higher quality than the .965s,
though there have always been a few good .965ers around—Takahashi has made some
excellent ones like their LEs over the years.

How were the Ramsdens and Kellners? The Ramsdens with their
two simple lenses were pretty bad. Mostly, they share the foibles of the
Huyenians, if to a lesser degree: excess
color, small fields, tight eye relief. Their main attraction was that they were
cheap and would do a reasonable if not perfect job on telescopes—like Newtonian
reflectors—with smaller focal ratios like f/8 and f/10 that stymied the
Huygenians. Ramsdens are bearable, or at least they were bearable for us sprouts who didn’t know no better.

Kellners are a lot like the Ramsdens and Huygenians, but
with a doublet achromat as the eye lens. The Kellner is better at everything.
The eye relief ain’t so hot, but it is still better than the Huygenian in that regard,
color is pretty well controlled, and the field is reasonably large, or was by
the standards of the time—somewhere around forty degrees of apparent field of
view. The drawback? The eyepieces tended to fall apart at shorter focal
lengths, with performance getting worse when you got shorter than 15mm or so.
The short eye-relief, especially at short focal lengths, made high power
Kellners a royal pain to use and consequently rare.

‘Course, we all wanted more better gooder, and most of us
sprouts (and adults in the avocation) were at least dimly aware there were
better eyepieces than Ramsdens and Kellners, and that one might dramatically
improve views through almost any telescope. At first, the name of that better
eyepiece was “Orthoscopic.”

With four lens elements, the “Ortho” is more complex than
any of the previous eyepieces. Its arrangement makes what can be a nearly
perfect eyepiece at some focal lengths. Distortions are very minor across the
field. Alas, that field is the Ortho’s downfall, with its AFOV being restricted
to a miniscule (by modern standards) 40 – 45-degrees. More serious, perhaps, is
the eyepiece’s lack of eye relief, making shorter focal length ones impossible
for eyeglass wearers to use.

Even today, a good Orthoscopic can be an impressive, and we
sure loved them in the late-sixties/early seventies. In theory at least. The
problem with the Ortho for us wasn’t lack of apparent field or lack of eye
relief; it was our lack of cash. An Ortho from Edmund would set you back about $15.00 (compared to $5.00 for a
Ramsden), and one from Criterion was about the same, equivalent to at least $75.00 in today’s miniscule
money. Yet most of us, including Unk, began to accumulate a few of these
babies as we finished college and entered the workforce as the seventies began
to wind down. I was crazy about the Vixen Orthoscopics that were beginning to come in
from Japan. But by that time most of us, those of us who were focused on the
deep sky, had moved past the Orthoscopic and were embracing a new (old) design,
the Erfle.

The Erfle really wasn’t new, having been designed by
Heinrich Erfle back in the First World War for military use. But they were new
to us kids and really to amateurs in general. Prior to the sixties any
commercial astro gear was rare, but by the time our days in the Sun (and under
the stars) began, the equipment industry was burgeoning in a small way, and as
the seventies came in, the usual suspects including Edmund and Criterion as
well as upstarts like Celestron and Meade were selling Erfle eyepieces, if not
that cheaply, with one going for as much as $30.00 by the mid 1970s.

What would all
that moola get you? A cool-looking five-element eyepiece for which you
would sometimes need a 2-inch focuser (or just a 2-inch visual back for your C8).
Cool looking not just because of that big 2-inch barrel, but because of the
humongous eye lens. When you finally glommed onto one and inserted it into your
Orange Tube, you were presented with this gigantic field. With an AFOV of 60 - 65-degrees, using one of these puppies was
like looking through a spaceship porthole. Who wanted to go back to peering at
stuff through a soda-straw sized Orthoscopic?

Not that the Erfle was or is perfect. It suffered from a
variety of problems, most centering around poor edge of field quality. Erfles
are particularly prone to astigmatism, and they suffer from ghost images, too.
B-U-T…at longer focal lengths they are bearable even today, especially in a
slower scope. Longer focal length eyepieces were not a problem back then, since
most of us were trying to get a little less
magnification out of our new f/10 SCTs. Ghosting? We were using these things on
the deep sky, not bright stars or planets, so that was not a problem, either.

As amateur astronomy, or at least the business side of amateur
astronomy continued to grow, a formerly exotic design, the Plössl, signed in.
This eyepiece, composed of two lens doublets, couldn’t match the Erfle for
AFOV, but the edge of that 50 – 55-degree Plössl field sure did look a lot
better. Unk became a fan of the legendary Celestron Silver Top Plössls in the
80s, but that was not the big eyepiece story of the decade. That was TeleVue and THE Nagler and Al Nagler. Uncle Al, that is, the
first person I recall being given the now-common amateur astronomy honorific “Uncle”
after the legendary original, Unk Albert Ingalls.

Al Nagler started out just like a lot of us starry-eyed
young-pup astronomers in the 1950s and 1960s, but he quickly showed he was
going to take things just a wee bit farther than most of us. In the late 60s,
most of us schlemiels were still trying to figure out how to build a 6-inch
Newtonian that would take us deeper into space than our puny 60mm refractors. Al? In the
early 50s he’d already hand-crafted a prize-winning 8-inch—an 8-inch Newtonian was
a huge, and I do mean HUGE, telescope in the 50s and 60s.

Al didn’t rest on his laurels; he became a regular at Stellafane, and it was obvious he was a rising
star of an ATM. The 1960s found him at Farrand Optical working on the optics
for the Apollo LEM simulator. Al’s story is one of a talented hard worker who,
in 1977, started his own company, TeleVue Optics Incorporated, located (then) in
Spring Valley, New York. The only surprising part of the Nagler story? His
company didn’t start pumping out eyepieces and refractor telescopes for a little
while.

TV’s first big product was for TVs, lenses for projection televisions.
One of the common features of the mirror-ball festooned discos in the age of Saturday Night Fever was a projection TV.
Since there were no commercially available color flat panel displays, tubes
projected images onto a curved screen almost the size of the HD TVs we have in
our living rooms today. The projectors were crude and the images dim, and a
good projection lens was essential and that was what TeleVue supplied.

Not that Al had abandoned astronomy, not hardly. By the late
1970s he was also selling a line of Plössl eyepieces. By this time, most of us
Jane and Joe Amateurs had had some experience with “symmetrical” oculars, but
Al’s Plössls turned out to be something special, with much attention being
given optical quality and build quality. Reviewers and rank and file amateurs noticed
how sharp the TV eyepieces were. We were further attracted by a price, $45.00
initially, which, while not cheap, was doable for most of us who’d started out
as kid astronomers in the 60s. Almost from the get-go, Al established himself
as the king of quality eyepieces.

Unk Al had
something special in mind for his next big product. An eyepiece that not only equaled but surpassed the apparent fields of the
Erfles by a fair margin with an 82-degree AFOV as compared to the 60-something
of the older eyepieces. More importantly, Al, using the experience he’d gained
working on the NASA optical systems, was able to achieve a big field that was
impressively sharp and aberration free, even when used with the increasingly
fast optics of them new-fangled “Dobsonians.” Not only was the Nagler the first
new significant eyepiece design in many years, it was far more complex than
anything else being marketed to amateur astronomers at the time, with some of
the eyepieces being made up of eight lens elements.

In 1980, the first Nagler, the 13mm, went on sale. It wasn’t
cheap; in fact it was scary expensive, $250.00, which is equivalent to at least
600 of today’s smaller greenbacks. You’d a-thought we-all would have laughed Al
Nagler’s Nagler out of town: imagine paying more for an eyepiece than you did
for your telescope! But we didn’t. The few reports we were getting said Al’s
claim that viewing with the Nagler was like walking in space was true. And maybe the preaching of Al and
Lumicon founder/owner Dr. Jack Marling that eyepieces contribute a lot to a
telescope’s performance was finally sinking in. Bottom line? We all wanted a
Nagler, even if we couldn’t afford one.

A 9mm and a 4.8mm followed the 13mm by 1982, and as the
1980s wore on more focal lengths were introduced along with an improved models
of some of ‘em. The Type II Naglers and the monstrous and, for the time,
monstrously expensive ($425.00) 20mm Nagler coming out in 1986. I reckon all us
old timers remember Al’s funny but succinct ad for the 20mm. Anyhoo, that was
about where my story with Al began. Not that I immediately rushed out and bought
the 20, young engineer not long out of the military with a young family that I
was.

I continued on happily with my Vixen Orthos, a Konig or two, and, when I wanted More Better Gooder
field wise, a University Optics Erfle I’d finally acquired. It was not bad at
all in my SCT, if not perfect either. In other words, I was a happy little
camper because I didn’t know no better.

That changed one fall night in 1993 at one of the first Deep South Regional Star Gazes I attended. While taking
a break from my telescope, which at that particular time was an 8-inch F/7
Coulter Odyssey 8-inch, and strolling around the field I came upon the setup of
a nice feller, a fellow Coulter user. Except this was a big dog of an Odyssey.
I can’t remember if it was a 13-inch Odyssey I or a 17-inch Odyssey II, but it
was way bigger than my humble 8. This kind soul asked me if I wanted a look at
M13 before it got too low. I said, “Sure,” which he responded to with, “Hold on
a minute. Let me put the 13mm Nagler in the focuser.”

To say my first look at the Great Globular with a Nagler was
a game changer would be an understatement. Dern good thing I wasn’t standing on
a ladder or I’d have been knocked off it. The first thing that struck me,
surprisingly, was not that huge 82-degree field, but how sharp and tiny the
cluster stars were. And how good the contrast between those stars and the
background field was. The pea-picking Coulters were not exactly optical
marvels, but the Nagler went a long way to making this one act like a marvel.
Even without a coma corrector—I didn't know pea-turkey about coma correctors in the early
90s, anyway—the stars at the edge of the field of this f/4.5 scope were dang good. As
good or better, I thought, than they would have been in a narrower field
ocular. I just looked and looked, probably outstaying my welcome, but I
couldn’t help it.

So I started dreaming of a Nagler of my own. Not that TV was
the only game in town when it came to 82-degree AFOV eyepieces. Al had been
competing with Meade for a while in Plössls and soon enough they came out with
their own “Naglers,” the Ultra
Wide Angles, that, with some justification, a lot of us referred to as
“clones.” Clones, maybe, but good ones, and in slightly different focal lengths
than the Naglers. Some people really
liked ‘em, liked ‘em better than the “real” Naglers. Some still do. Honestly,
differences were fairly minor. But only when compared to Al’s original eyepieces.
The difference was that Unk Al continued to improve and upgrade his eyepieces
with the Type II Naglers and beyond. Meade made no real changes to their UWAs
till 2006.

Christmas of 1995 I finally got a Nagler of my own, a 12mm
Type II thanks to the dear Miss Dorothy. I loved the 12 very much and I used it
happily for over a decade. I was never really a Nagler hog, though. I got back
into astrophotography in the mid 90s and progressed on to CCDing and webcamming
when those things came into the picture. When I did “just look,” I tended to
think my 12 Nag was enough. With an f/6.3 reducer on the C8, or barefoot on the
C8, or with the TeleVue Big Barlow on the C8 I had a purty fair range of
magnifications with the single Nag. If I had to have “way down low,” I slammed
in my trusty 2-inch 38mm Rini Super Plössl (sorry you younguns missed Paul
Rini’s plain but lovable oculars). Oh, I sometimes ruminated wistfully
on the 20mm Nagler, but never got around to buying it.

One thing other than Unk’s basic stinginess diverted him
from the Nagler path: TeleVue Panoptics. I loved and still love these 68-degree
eyepieces. They are very fine. I have the 35, the 27, and the 22, and they
perform splendidly in my driven SCTs. No, you don’t get quite the spacewalk
effect you get with the Naglers, but almost. And they are cheaper. Considerably
cheaper, which is always a draw for little old me.

I did eventually get more 82-degree eyepieces, but not
Naglers. As the 1990s ran out, the Mainland Chinese optical giants began
spitting out spacewalk eyepieces. At first, they were pretty punk, with field
edges near bad enough to make my Aunt Lulu’s poodle dog throw up his Gravy
Train. But they got better in a hurry. In 2006, a series of 82-degree eyepieces
that ranged from “almost as good” to “a little bit better” than Naglers
appeared. These were and are sold by William Optics as the Uwans, and are also available from Orion (U.S.) as the Megaviews. If there is a down-check
to the Uwans, it’s the limited number of focal lengths, 4, 7, 16, and 28
millimeters and the fact that the Chinese maker has, like Meade with its Ultra
Wides for so many years, not continued to improve the oculars.

Did the Chinese clones or semi-clones hurt TeleVue? Not
really. Plenty of amateurs realized that while the fare for a TeleVue was
higher, it got you THE BEST. In some cases a Meade or a Uwan might be slightly,
ever so slightly, better in some focal lengths, but it was slight and that was
offset by TeleVue’s consistently better build quality and customer support.

In the early years of this new century, Uncle Al was in the
doldrums as far as I was concerned. Oh, he continued to release new and better
eyepieces, making it all the way to the type 6es in the Nagler line, adding
focal lengths, and introducing zooms and specialty eyepieces like the Radians.
I was waiting for something on the blow-you-away order of the introduction of
the first Nagler, though, and began to think that might not ever happen.

Then it did. In 2008 I purchased an eyepiece that changed
everything again. Some time before, my good buddy Pat Rochford and I had begun
hearing a rumor that Al was gonna do it again: this time with a hundred degree apparent field eyepiece.
Surely that couldn’t be true? 100-freaking-degrees? It was true, and the first
look through one—coincidentally maybe, again a 13mm—that Pat and I had out on
the Chiefland Astronomy Village observing field convinced both of us we had to
have one.

I spent one November CAV starparty doing nothing but using my two Ethos eyepieces--I couldn’t resist also
buying the 8mm that followed the 13 out the gate. I looked at everything in my 12-inch Dobsonian. I
looked at every halfway decent object I could think of because every object
looked new again. The experience, which I can only call EXTREME space walking,
was just like the time I put my eye to that old 13 Nagler. After that I could
never go back to 55-degrees. After the Ethos, I didn’t think I could go back to
a mere 82.

Over the last several years Unk Al has continued to add more
focal lengths to the Ethos line, a line of eyepieces that even the naysayers—and there are a few of those—admit is probably the best series of oculars ever released. As
always, though, Al has competition. This time from Explore Scientific, whose ES
100s are, like the Meade UWAs were, a little less expensive and available in
slightly different focal lengths. Will ES, unlike Meade, continue to upgrade
and expand over the long run? Only time will tell, but Scott Roberts and
company seem to be pulling ahead of TeleVue in innovation at the moment, having
just released a ground-breaking (and expensive) 9mm eyepiece with a dadgum 120-degree apparent field.

And good on ‘em. Honest competition never hurt anybody. I am
not immune to the allure of better and cheaper, muchachos, not hardly. My
eyepiece box ain’t TeleVue only—hell, I even have a Zhumell 100 in there. And yet, and yet... When I want the best, I keep coming back to good,
old Uncle Al. Things haven’t changed in that regard since the night I put my
wondering eye up to that funny looking eyepiece and nearly fell into its field.